PHOTO CREDIT: Hemingray Glass Workers, 1915. Image courtesy of Ball State University’s Bracken Archive and Special Collections.
Muncie’s Black community dates to the earliest years of the settlement. The Clark, Scott, and Artis families all settled in the mid-19th century. By the 1870s, forty-eight African American families called Muncie home, constituting about 1.6% of the city’s population, and this proportion grew to 3.6% in 1880. These Munsonians worked as barbers, laborers, restaurateurs, blacksmiths, launderers, and teamsters. Just before the gas boom, 187 of 5,219 Muncie residents were of African descent. By 1890, as the boom began to supercharge Muncie’s industrialization, 418 Black residents lived in a city of 11,345.
During the Great Migration, as millions of African Americans moved to northern industrial cities, the Black population in Muncie grew substantially. As a result, Muncie’s white population established both formal and informal racist color lines throughout the city. Muncie’s Black residents in the 20th century settled and lived primarily in the Whitely and Industry neighborhoods. From there, Muncie’s Black community launched businesses, established houses of worship, and established organizations that tied that community strongly together.
PHOTO CREDIT: Three former slaves: Mary Elizabeth Brown, 100; Betty Gunn, 103; and Mary Elizabeth Jackson, 103; Honored at Bethel A.M.E. Church, 1935. Photo courtesy Ball State University's Bracken Archive and Special Collections.